The Great Rift
A seemingly impassible chasm that spans the northernmost edge of the Northern Kingdom. It has a number of myths that surround it.
The orcneas
There was once a great sea to the east of the Heart Fire mountains. One day ships arrived from the other side of the sea, bearing an unknown people that began to build settlements along the shore of the great sea. The people were greedy, however, and they began to dig into the sacred mountain of the Sleeping Lady to steal her treasures. The sleeping goddess of the mountain woke and was angry with these strangers for taking the treasures meant for her people. She split the mountains to cause the waters of the eastern sea to wash through the mountains and carry the strangers away to the west. The People prayed to their sleeping goddess and begged her to please end the flooding, for in her anger at the strangers the goddess had killed many of her own people and flooded the great plains of grass where they hunted for the sacred animals that grazed on the grasslands. The sleeping goddess took pity on her people and sliced the land, creating the great rift that drained the water from the great plains and into a new sea to the east. The strangers that had come from the west were trapped in the plains and forbidden from ever crossing the mountains again and they remain there, greedily scavenging for what treasures the sleeping goddess, in her compassion, sends to them through the rivers and streams that flow from her mountains.
The dwarves
Once part of the People of the Mountain, the People of the Plains were cast out by the orcneas for having taken pity on the strangers from beyond the sea of the east. It was the magics of the orcneas that caused the ground to shake until the mountains were broken and the eastern sea flooded the western lands. The people cried out to the Sleeping Lady for mercy and she sliced the land in the north to create the great rift that drained the plains. The Sleeping Lady then gifted the plains to the outcasts and laid down across the end of the valley to block the waters from ever flooding the plains again, and to sleep until her cherished children could reclaim the Fire Heart mountains from the orcneas.
The hauflin
There was once a great sea to the east, beyond the mountains of fire. And beyond that sea was the lands of The People. The People were happy in their lands, but they yearned to see what lay beyond the great sea. They built boats that allowed them to cross the sea and on the shores beneath the mountains of fire they began to build a new home. The mountains of fire were filled with vast wealth unlike any that the People had ever seen before, and they dug into the mountains in search of the treasures. Crafting the gold, silver, and gemstones into great works of beauty and adorning their homes in the precocious metals of the mountain. They shared their wealth with the people that lived on the slopes of the mountains, trading them treasures and tools made of metal for the leathers, furs, and meats the mountain people gathered from land and sea. Not all of the mountain people were content, however, and in their greed they attacked the mountains of fire and used their magics to break the mountains. Once the mountains had been broken, the waters of the great eastern sea flooded through the mountains and swept the People into the world beyond the mountains. The land along the base of the mountains in the north was weak, however, and the waters sliced into it until they cut the great rift that drained the great plains and left the People, and some of the people of the mountains, stranded in the plains. The People can never return to their former home beyond the mountains of fire, so have built the great cities of the plains and adorned them with carvings of their history. What gold and gemstones they find, in the rivers and hills, is used to make treasures that recall the grandness that had once been their civilization beyond the mountains of fire and the sea that is no more.
The Northerners
"The rift? Who knows. It has always been there and I expect it always will be there, so who cares what caused it or why? It just is." "It is there to stop demons from coming down from the untamed lands beyond it." "The rift? I don't know, the dwarves have one story, the halflings another, I hear even the orcs have some myth about the rift that's different still. I don't care as long as nothing terrible comes up out of it." "The rift was made by the gods so we know where our lands end. Just like the mountains to the south and west, and the great sea to the east."
The Temple of Justice: The New Northern Edition of the Book of Laws
Men are not meant to cross the rift. The God of Justice cut it into the world to separate the Northern lands from the world of demons that is beyond the frozen mountains to the north. - The Book of the North
The Centaurs
The world was once owned by the centaur. Then came the "others". The centaur sought to live in peace with the others, but those not of the centaur were jealous of the close bond the centaur had with the spirits of the land. They sought to control the centaur. The spirits of the ancestors were angered and stampeded from the western skies, appearing as horses in the foam of a great torrent of water that washed across the lands of the centaur. The spirits of the land saw that the ancestors were too angry to know that they would harm their own people, so the land opened to the north and the angry spirits stampeded to the great sea. Those spirits that were not overtaken by their anger were transformed into horses by the spirits of the land, so that they might watch over the centaur and protect them. The angry ancestor spirits were forced into the sea and forever seek to return to the land of the living. They can sometimes be seen in the great rift or in the lands beyond the rift, and will crash against the great wall of the world where the land meets the sea to the east. Legend is that they are trying to climb back up to be reborn in the great plains where the wild horses run. When a centaur or wild horse dies, their spirit is carried by the rain to the rivers, so that the spirits of the earth can take them to the great cliffs. Compelled by instinct, the spirits leap to the sea. They are content to swim in this after-life realm for a time, but eventually they join the herds at the base of the cliffs seeking to be reborn into the world of the living, or wander as lost spirits in the lands to the north of the great rift.
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